Wyatt hits a few keystrokes, zooming in on the model on the screen, until I can read the hieroglyphs on the wall. It’s almost like being there. “Amazing, right?” Wyatt murmurs.
“It’s incredible,” I say. “How does it work?”
“I take a photo of a site and enter it into software, and—how is it you say?—bam,we have a 3D model with topography.”
Wyatt points to an icon on the desktop. “Show her this one.”
He hands me a set of gaming goggles and I fit them over my head, waiting as a picture loads before my eyes. I draw in my breath, suddenly transported to awadiI know well: a rock overhang; a quiet, dark hollow beneath. I stretch my arm out as if I might touch it, but of course, it’s only digital.
“Turn left,” Wyatt instructs, and I do, leaning forward to simulate walking, until I am close enough to read the painted hieratic rock inscription we had found years ago.
It’s so different from the way we used to do things. The Mylar we used attracted dust and melted in the brutal heat and there were constantly shimmers of light caught in the plastic so I’d be forever correcting my image against the actual carved sign. This—this is nothing short of revolutionary.
“The sites we excavate are in situ in a landscape,” Wyatt says. “They’re meant to be viewed there. This is about as close as you can get, without flooding Middle Egypt with tourists and their fanny packs. The way we used to do it, you lost half the information—whythe inscriptions were put in that particular place, instead of somewhere else.”
I lean forward again, moving closer to the virtual rock wall. “Epigraphy must take half the time.”
“You have no idea,” Wyatt replies. He tugs the goggles off me and hands me an iPad. “Alberto makes a flattened ortho image based off the high-def 3D image and sends it here. Then I can trace the hieroglyphs like it’s a coloring book. You can manipulate the color and change the contrast if the stone itself is busy, like limestone, and you need to tell what’s aspect of the stone and what’s part of the carving.”
“Then after he traces everything, I can put it back into the 3D image of the site,” Alberto adds.
“It means we can get a final drawing even within one part of a given field season.”
“And it’s incredible for sites like the one we are working on now,” Alberto says. “Instead of having to decide whether you’ll put a section through this way or that way, and instead of destroying layers with each excavation, you take a 3D photo before you start, another photo after you clear the first layer, another photo after the second layer—e così via—it is like having a birthday cake you can slice and unslice and reslice any way you want.”
“The only downside,” Joe pipes in from across the room, “is that the iPads overheat and the batteries die and my tender ears are subject to curses in a variety of languages.”
For a moment, I think that maybe I am years too late. That there’s no way to continue where I left off. Then Wyatt takes his iPad from my hands, tapping a few icons until a new three-dimensional image appears. “Djehutynakht’s tomb,” he says, and he offers it to me.
As a grad student I had read up on the excavation of the Djehutynakhts whose coffins were in the MFA—but this doesn’t look familiar. Instead, there is a tomb chapel, and a shaft in various stages of excavation.
“Not Djehutynakht II,” Wyatt clarifies. “Djehutynakht, son of Teti.”
I pinch at the screen, trying to get closer.
“It’s not published yet,” he says quietly.
In other words: I am the first person outside of his team to see it.
There is nothing—nothing—like being the one to discover a piece of the world that has gone missing. Your pulse races, your heart pounds, you forget to breathe. You go still, wanting to hold on to this moment, when it is just you and your miracle, before everyone else intervenes. I was lucky enough to have had that experience, once, with Wyatt. The closest I ever came to it, again, was giving birth to Meret.
“I’d heard you’d found it,” I murmur. But reading that tidbit and seeing this on the screen are two very different things.
I don’t realize I’ve said this aloud until I find Wyatt looking down at me, his face inscrutable. “It’s even better in person,” he says. “Let’s go to Minya.”
—
WYATT ASKS MEif I want to change before heading back to the city. When I tell him I didn’t come with luggage, he narrows his eyes. “You flew to Egypt without a suitcase?”
“Yes.”
“Planning to work at an archaeological site.”
I raise my chin a notch. “Yes.”
“Without any appropriate clothing.”
“It was,” I say, “sort of a last-minute decision.”
